Sunday, May 15, 2011

Northwestern researchers Alexandra Parbery-Clark, Dana Strait, Samira Anderson, Emily Hittner and Nina Kraus have published a journal article that extends the work being done into advantages that students get from musical training and experience to the elderly. Their work seems to show that life-long musical training improves memory and the ability to understand speech in noisy environments. This makes sense, intuitively. After all, the human auditory system, like the human visual system, relies upon extracting and matching patterns to do its job and the more practice it gets the better job it can do!